Godard at his most expansive and reflective, Hélas pour moi touches some of the great questions of existence: love, faith, spirituality, and how we remember the moments of our lives, all bottled up in Godard's typical intellectual rigor and righteous fury. In an amusing bit of Church-baiting (especially after his controversial Hail Mary), Godard's main character is a filmmaker (Gérard Depardieu) possessed by God, who mainly wants to use the man's body “to feel human desire.” His journey through earthly desires and human doubts, set amid scenic Lake Geneva, allows Godard to rant, brood, and most of all question the essence of spirituality and existence. Surprisingly lyrical and far less antagonistic than the earlier Hail Mary, the film still (unsurprisingly) drew protests from the Catholic Church. Depardieu's presence, and a pun-driven marketing campaign (“DeparDIEU! GODard!”) seemed to promise a populist turn for Godard; instead, he delivered a typically “elegantly layered, rhythmically complex, and willfully impenetrable celluloid construction” (Village Voice).